How this works
This site is two things at once: an index of every project in my GitHub estate, and a small platform that actually runs some of them. Demos sleep when nobody is using them and wake on the first request, which is what makes running several of them affordable.
The sequence
- The index is public. Project names, one-line summaries, domain and language are visible to everyone.
- Product detail is password-protected. The full write-up is rendered by the gateway only after the password is accepted — it is never sent to an unauthenticated browser.
- Live demos are invite-gated separately. An invite link carries an opaque token; redeeming it opens a session scoped to that one demo host.
- A sleeping demo wakes on the first request. The first visitor after a quiet period waits about forty seconds; everyone after that gets a running container.
Why it is gated
Most of these repositories are private and several are unfinished. Gating the detail keeps half-built work out of search results and keeps the load on a small server predictable. It is not a paywall — ask and you get the password.
What it runs on
A static Astro site for these pages, and a reverse proxy in front of everything else that handles the catalogue, the password gate, invite redemption, per-host sessions, wake and sleep, and issue reporting.